Category: Read/Write

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 3

Hi readers, on Day 3 of our Read/Write Challenge we take a look at “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula Le Guin. There is so much going on here! I had a hard time choosing just one feature to discuss.

One Thing (Okay, Three Things) I Noticed: The story defies genre. It describes Omelas, a beautiful town on a sparkling bay, surrounded by majestic mountains, and inhabited by a peaceful people with rich traditions and a seemingly perfect life. It is speculative fiction, in a “what if,” sense, but not true sci-fi or fantasy. It has elements of magical realism and fairy tales, but those don’t seem quite right either. Omelas is a place without government, war, political struggle, or poverty. But there is just one thing. The town has a dirty little secret that makes all of that possible. It is revealed to us–though we know it already–that privilege like this is built on a foundation of injustice.

The story also demonstrates the power of naming things. This is not “once upon a time there was a town.” It has a proper name, Omelas (fun fact, Le Guin came up with the name while looking at a sign for Salem, Oregon, in her rear-view mirror). So do the Green Fields and the Eighteen Peaks. Names make a place come to life. They evoke many things. Most of all, they tell us what features of this place the inhabitants find important.

Finally, this is a great example of metafiction, “a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional world.” Le Guin wants to paint a picture of a certain kind of place. She gives her readers some options here. Maybe the town is like this. Or maybe it is like this. Maybe the people do this, or maybe they do this, or this, instead. She invites us to incorporate whichever of these details do the trick for us as readers. By doing this, she reminds us that the place is not real-real. It can’t be, because she hasn’t told us its horrible truth. Le Guin then addresses us directly, asking if that terrible piece of information doesn’t make the place more credible in our minds. And it does. Le Guin achieves something powerful here. We are no longer innocent bystanders. In a way, we have helped her construct this world, from our own experiences. We are complicit.

One Idea: Write a story in which you describe a place, person, or event in different ways, addressing the reader directly and leaving it to him or her to decide which details ring true, which best serve the story.

I hope you enjoyed our first two weekend stories! See you tomorrow for more weekday writing!

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 2

Okay readers, time for the first short story on our list, “Ghosts,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As promised, here is one thing I noticed about Adichie’s writing and one idea the story gave me for my own writing. 

One Thing I Noticed: The story is written from the first-person singular point of view. The narrator is a retired professor who runs into an old acquaintance who he thought died years ago. The two have a somewhat tentative conversation, and the narrator realizes how much their paths have diverged. Rather than tell us about the main character through third-person exposition, Adichie gives us his background story in bits and pieces, through the conversation and through the memories that the conversation sparks in the narrator’s mind.

First-person is a good point of view to use when blurring the line between what is real (here, what happened to the narrator’s family after the war) and what may not be (the visions of his wife’s ghost visiting him) because everything that is happening to the narrator is real, at least to him.

One Idea: Write a story about a person who does not believe in ghosts and is visited by one.

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Read more here about Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War.

And check out both Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun and Chinua Achebe’s (author of Things Fall Apart) 2013 memoir There Was a Country.

If you would like to read ahead this month, here is the whole reading list of short stories. Happy reading!

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Read/Write Challenge – Day 1

Shall we dive into our new monthly challenge? Here is my first 20-minute free write prompted by a line from a book.

“I woke up lying naked in my own bed.” The Samurai’s Garden, by Gail Tsukiyama, p. 53.

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I woke up lying naked in my own bed. Well, almost naked. Pretty stripped down. Not dripping with sweat, as I had been earlier in the week, but chalky, covered in a salty frost bloom that was the remembrance of past drenchings. I stared at the ceiling. The same black drywall nail the paint had flaked off long ago stared down at me like a single star in a photo-negative sky. Mustering the energy from who knew where, I grasped a steepled paperback half-nestled beneath the wrinkled sheets and flung it at the nail. The book crashed down again and I had to roll away to avoid it, covering my face with the palms of my hands.

Imagine living your life in a prison cell, I thought. Even a spacious one like this, painted some sunlight-catching Sherwin Williams shade called “fawn” or “buttered bread.” Even one with a four-poster bed and 800-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. Even one with a flat-screen TV tucked elegantly into a framed white bead-board recess in the wall. Even one with light-blocking curtains and central air. In the end, no matter how well-appointed the cell, you wanted to leave. And you couldn’t.

I had been lying in that bed for the better part of two weeks. Criminals on TV received sentences of 30 years to life. I wondered how they managed it. Perhaps, if asked, they would tell you the first two weeks are the hardest. After that, you find God. Or you lose him forever. You come to terms with things.

Do the electrical impulses in the brain that signal a desire to be free eventually stop firing, I wondered. Do they sizzle like a licked-finger-pinched match? Or do they just lie dormant, like a blossomless orchid, dry and forgotten on a windowsill but with creeping air roots still blindly plumbing the space all around for nourishment?

I wasn’t going to find out. Nelson had spoken with the doctor, called ahead to check the emergency room wait times. I was going to the hospital. It was Christmas Eve.

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June Read/Write Challenge

Hi writers! Ready for a new monthly challenge? In June I’ve decided to take a break from trying to create a finished product each day (because–whew!–it’s exhausting) and focus instead on maintaining a daily writing habit, generating new material, and seeking out inspiration.

So our June challenge has two parts:

Part 1: Weekday Writing 

For the writing portion of the challenge, let’s try this. Each morning (or afternoon, or evening, or whenever you can squeak time to write into your busy schedule), grab a random book from your bookshelf, open to any page, point without looking to any paragraph, and choose a sentence from that paragraph as your first line. Then free-write for 20 minutes, no more, no less. No pressure to turn this into anything, no editing, no judgment. This is about habit-formation. This is about diving into your writing without overthinking things.

Part 2: Weekend Reading 

There are nine weekend days in the month of June and I made a list of nine short stories by women authors that I want to read and learn from. Women authors because, let’s face it, a lot of the classic short stories we read in school are by men. I also want to expand my horizons a little. I have my favorites (Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty) but I want to read more diverse points of view.

In a recent TED talk on the power of stories, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had this to say about the power of stories:

“Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.” We have so much to learn from stories, stories told my many voices, not just on the craft of writing, but on the nature of being a human being in this world.”

I’ll post each of the stories on my weekend reading list for this month. Whether you read along with me or create your own list, I encourage you to jot down one thing that you noticed about the author’s technique and one idea that the story gave you for your own writing.